Hush Money

  “So here’s what I’m offering: my silence, and Jeff’s silence, guaranteed, your freedom and secrecy secure, for the low, low price of just $500.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m. So. Not.” Marco was dead serious now. “You think about it. You get the money together. You’ve got two weeks. Now bye-bye, see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!” He ruffled my hair and pushed at my head as he walked away, enough to make me take a step to keep my balance.

  “Gawd, what an idiot,” Kat said, disgusted.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  I swear I wanted to grab her and shake. Hard. “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I’m not paying that bastard so he can go enrich the porn industry, or whatever. Screw that. And screw him.”

  “Kat…”

  “I don’t know, Joss. I need to think about this. But I’m not paying him.”

  Suddenly I could tell that she was shaken. I decided to back off.

  “I could help. I’ve got some money saved.”

  Kat looked surprised, then smiled, but not as brightly as she usually did. She touched my arm, briefly. “Thanks, Joss. That’s really nice. I told you we’d be friends, didn’t I?” A horn beeped. “Look, that’s my mom. I gotta go.”

  She got in the car and they drove off, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, thinking about how the last thing I wanted was a friend with a Talent who would get herself hauled off to the State School.

  Chapter 7

  Joss

  You realize, of course, that you are a complete idiot.

  Well, conscience, I’d say that much is obvious.

  Such were my thoughts as I made my way from the safety of my stairwell down to the cafeteria at about half past lunchtime. Truth be told, ever since I’d had to share my space with Marco, all his limbs, and his unfortunate idea of entertainment, I was really soured on what had been my own little corner of Fairview High for the last few years.

  Needless to say that the cafeteria was chaos as usual, and yeah, it scared the crap out of me. But at least this time I had a clear objective in my sights, and I was more wary of skirting too close to the muck like I did last time.

  Kat was sitting with the same group she had been with the other day: Heather, Maddy, and Elizabeth. Maddy’s brother Matt was there too, straddling a backward chair between Maddy and Kat and talking intently to his sister about something. Maddy raised a gloved hand—part of her unique style was to always wear these thin, leather cyclist gloves—and gave Matt the finger with a sneer on her pixie-like features. And that’s when they looked up and saw me standing there, rather awkwardly, holding my books in front of me in that way I remembered I shouldn’t but couldn’t change now.

  Not so much a sense of everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came, so much as startled bewilderment from everyone at the table. But Matt immediately got up and spun the chair around.

  “Want my seat, Joss? I was just leaving.”

  I felt my face getting hot. “Oh, no, you don’t have to—”

  “No, really, I’ll be contemplating twinnicide if I spend another minute with this brat.” He cuffed Maddy on the back of her short, platinum hair. “Take it.”

  “Um, thanks.”

  Matt wandered away and I thought, not for the first time, how different they were. Him big, kind of brawny, but with that whole prep-school wannabe thing he had going. Her small, and slight, but also edgy, looking like a punk-rock fairy. And really, Matty and Maddy? Naming your daughter Matilda is bad enough, but the naming police ought to come and shoot their parents.

  “So, Joss, cool to see you. What brings you to the cafeteria?”

  That’s a good question, Kat. What the hell was I thinking? I’d been so into talking to her about what had happened after school the day before that I hadn’t even thought about the fact that I’d never be able to get a private word in this place. Great. I casually turned my head to glance around the room and saw several people look quickly away, including Dylan, and made a note-to-self never to do this again.

  “Not much, really. I wanted to ask you if I could talk to you—after school—if you’re not busy or anything.”

  “Really?”

  “Um, yeah, but it’s no big—”

  “No! That totally works because I was going to ask you to come over to my house today.”

  I glanced around the table. Maddy was talking quietly to Elizabeth—who I don’t think ever talked any other way than quietly. They were a study in opposites with Maddy’s rebel looks and Elizabeth’s classic shy girl chic. Heather caught my glance, smiled, and moved her chair around the table to get in on their conversation, leaving Kat and me a little more privacy. “Your…house?” I stuttered. You’d think she’d invited me to her family crypt as freaked out as I was by the invitation.

  “Yeah, you know, where I live, with my parents. And I keep my room there too.”

  “Huh. Interesting.”

  “So…will you come over?”

  “Why?”

  Kat made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Because that’s where I keep my Great Big Book of Manners by Emily Post and I want to beat you with it.”

  I was totally confused and just looked at her blankly.

  Which got me another disgusted noise and a bonus eye-roll. “Never mind. I wanted to talk to you, too. About some stuff I don’t want to talk about here.” This last was said with a meaningful look.

  “Oh. Well, ok. I guess so.”

  She flashed that freakishly charming smile at me. I could feel the corners of my own mouth want to turn up. I wondered if it was another Talent or if she was just born with the dose of charisma the Charm Angel forgot to give me. Though I had been heretofore convinced that my lack was a genetic defect inherited from my dad—and not much missed.

  “Great! So meet me in front after school—same place I was yesterday, and my mom will pick us up, ok?”

  “I…I should probably go home,” I hedged. “My mom’s expecting me…” The subject of me going to a friend’s house instead of walking straight home had never come up before. I wasn’t sure how that worked.

  “Oh, you can call her from my house. And if it’s a problem, my mom will just drive you home. But it won’t be, ’cause your mom likes me, and wants you to spend more time with me.”

  The fact that that was probably true made me scowl darkly at her.

  “So you’ll come, right? Because I really want us to talk.”

  “Yeah, I’ll come,” but only because a chance to talk some sense into you was what I wanted in the first place.

  “Yay!” And then she hugged me.

  Geez.

  * * *

  Joss

  There was a lot of pink in Kat’s room. Bright pink, bright aqua, bright yellow. You get the idea. All matching white furniture on a wood floor scattered with more bright rugs. Thanks to my little sister, I could recognize Hello Kitty and friends when I saw them, but I had no idea who the hunky guys on the walls were. I was really behind on current popular culture.

  Kat had me sitting in a giant hot pink and chrome chair that resembled a satellite dish but made me feel sort of like my ass was perched in King Kong’s palm. Or possibly it was the collection of stuffed animals on the bed that made me feel threatened.

  I had already called my mom from the comfort of the Dawson’s spacious living room. It seemed like practically every room in the house got a dose of her mom’s affection for porcelain dolls and figurines. They were all staring at me and creeping me out. But anyway, like Kat had said, mom sounded happy about me spending time over here. “Of course it’s ok for you go to a friend’s house, Jocelyn. Just be home by dinnertime. Do you need me to pick you up later?”

  Of course, she says, like we do this all the time. Like Dad wouldn’t flip if he even found out I had a friend.

  Do I? Have a friend? Kong’s hold was tightening.

  Kat breezed into the room wit
h a bowl of chips in one hand and a plate of cookies in the other. There was a small stack of plastic cups lying alongside the cookies and a 2-liter of diet cola dangling from between two fingers. I gave her the are you nuts? look she deserved.

  “I could have helped, if I’d known you were provisioning yourself for the winter.”

  Kat laughed. “The others should be here pretty soon.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Matt’s dropping Maddy, Elizabeth, and Heather off, but they had to go do something else first, I don’t know. I think Heather has a thing for Matt maybe, but I’m not sure. Do you drink diet?”

  “Whatever. I thought we were going to talk about your problem with Marco.”

  “Yeah, we are.”

  “Because, I still don’t think you understand how serious this is. He knows what you can do.”

  “I know, Joss. I was there too.”

  “He’s blackmailing you!”

  “Again, thanks for the recap. Marco is attempting to blackmail me.”

  I dropped my face into my hands. “And I’m attempting to clue you in on how bad that is. I told you not to get on his bad side, that you didn’t want him to notice you. But you just—”

  “I know, I know, you told me so. Noted. Now, moving on, here’s the thing about Marco: he’s a bully.” She dropped the statement with the finality of imparting some great piece of wisdom.

  “Duh.”

  “And the thing with bullies is that they’re really cowards. All talk, no action. I mean, what’s he ever really done? Nothing. Classic bully behavior is to rely on the fact that people feel threatened and capitulate before they ever have to bring about any actual consequences.”

  Classic bully behavior? Capitulate? I felt like I had just walked into a Psych 101 lecture hall. Then I remembered my dad saying, when they had first moved to Fairview, that Kat’s father was the new psych prof at the college. Lord, save us.

  “Plus, he’s just a stupid thug, Joss. We can’t let ourselves be afraid of an idiot like that. All we have to do is show him and everybody else that he’s not all that, he’s not so tough, then it’s going to be impossible for him to push us or anybody else around any more.”

  While she was spewing this insanity, I heard the doorbell, voices, footsteps on the stairs, and then the Three Musketeers burst through the door in a fit of giggles that stopped when they saw me. Maybe I have that effect on people. But they were friendly enough and said hi to me before they hit Kat’s snacky buffet and started making themselves comfortable. I wondered whose seat I was occupying.

  “We all hate that chair,” Heather said suddenly. When I looked over at her she was taking a long drink of soda.

  “I’m surprised Kat got anyone to sit in it. I hope you don’t fall on your head.”

  I looked at Maddy, but it didn’t seem like she was making fun of me, exactly. Still, I just wanted to get out of there. It had been over ten years since I’d hung out at a friend’s house with other girls my age. I was pretty sure the rules were different now, and I didn’t know them. Plus, there’s no way to hide in a group of five, especially when you’re the novelty.

  “So…when is this big party supposed to take place?”

  “Friday night,” Kat said. “Boy/girl, obviously.”

  “I beg your pardon?” It seemed like I was saying that a lot. “Party?”

  “For my birthday,” Kat said. “It’s tomorrow, really, but the party’s this weekend.”

  “Um…oh.”

  “I can’t believe you waited this long to start planning it,” Maddy said.

  “Nah, my mom’s already totally on that. She likes to do parties. All I have to do is invite people. And really, it’s Fairview, so not like anyone’s got big plans for the weekend. No big.”

  “True enough. Ok, so who’s on the guest list?”

  And then they commenced to pretty much list every single person in our class from Angela Mason, cheerleading goddess, down to Rob Grayson, computer geek. I think they even would have invited me, whether I’d been in on this planning session or not. And that begged the question, what was I doing there?

  “You’re coming, right Joss?” Heather asked.

  “I, um…have to ask my Dad…”

  “Ask your mom; she likes me,” Kat grinned.

  I had to smile and roll my eyes at her.

  “And of course we’ll be asking Dylan, just for you.”

  I choked on my soda and Heather jumped up to pound me on the back. “Damn, Kat. I hope you plan to be more subtle in the rest of your matchmaking scheme. Give the girl some warning.”

  “Matchmaking??” I croaked.

  “No. Inviting both of you to my party is as far as I’m going with it—”

  “Yet!” Maddy coughed into her glove.

  “—sort of.”

  “What does ‘sort of’ mean?” The edge of hysteria in my voice was so not cool.

  “The way I see it,” Kat said, “the biggest impediment to your future happiness with Dylan—”

  “What makes you think I want future happiness with Dylan??”

  “That would be my eyes, dear. Now, as I was saying, your problem, as I see it, is Marco. Marco’s pissed off at you for rejecting him, and Dylan can’t make his move because Marco’s standing between you. The big bully. We get rid of Marco, problem solved. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  She was giving me that meaningful look again, and yeah, sort of. But where was she getting all this? How did she know what happened between Marco and me? What made her think that Dylan wanted to make any move? Or that I wanted him to?

  Then I pulled my head out of my butt and realized that she was making that up. Kat needed some way to get her friends involved in her problem with Marco. So she was using me to do it! She was just making up this nonsense about Dylan and me out of her own curly little head. It was just a coincidence that, yeah, I actually had liked him forever, which she couldn’t possibly have guessed. Right?

  This was no doubt part of my punishment for the whole thing with Trina that had gotten Kat into her mess in the first place. And I still felt so guilty about it that I was inclined to go along with this—even though she was being an idiot and this party didn’t have a prayer of helping her. What was a friend supposed to do, beat some sense into her, or support the bad plan? I’d have to go with choice B, for the time being, anyway.

  “So, what can we do to put Marco in his place so he stops bothering our friend Joss?”

  * * *

  Dylan

  “I thought you said we were going to do this in the morning. With Rob.”

  “We will. We’ll do it again with Rob, at least once, maybe more before we do the job. I’m just…” Marco rolled his neck and shoulders as we wandered up the chip and soda aisle, “antsy. To get going on this thing. Didn’t want to wait for the weekend, and I can’t cut anymore school right now.”

  I grunted. I really didn’t want to be here at all. But at least right now, during the after-work/pre-dinner shopping rush, the store was busy and no one noticed two guys wandering around and not picking anything up.

  “What’s with you lately? You’re jumpy, you’re pissed off half the time, and you’re way too into this job that we shouldn’t even be thinking about. It’s way too complicated and not worth it. It’s stupid.”

  “Hey, I’ll decide what’s worth it and what’s not, all right? You just do what I tell you.”

  “Since fucking when?” I snarled in a low voice. I was pissed, but not enough not to care about attracting attention. Still, a few women glanced our way and moved off down the aisle.

  “Since fucking always. I’ve always looked out for you. And if I wanted to listen to a lot of nagging, I’d be out with some bitch who would make it worth my while later on.”

  We had reached the back of the store. “Hold on,” I said, and took a few steps over to a stack-out of soda cases. I waited for the last customer to leave the section, pulled a folded piece of paper from my pocket, and “
accidentally” dropped it. I bent over behind the soda to pick it up, and when I straightened up I was invisible.

  Hopefully no one but Marco had seen me disappear, and we had reasoned in the past that as long as nothing major happened, there was no reason for anyone to be looking at what cameras might have picked up. Nothing major. I couldn’t figure out why Marco wanted to start that now. For beer? What the hell?

  “I’ve always looked out for you.” It was true. And more and more I felt like I was paying for that. As kids, it had seemed like we were always equals, two boys who didn’t have much good going on at home, running wild, causing trouble and trying not to get caught. Then when we were nine, Marco did something for me that maybe sparked the change, for both of us. My mom’s piece of crap boyfriend had seemed all-powerful to me when he was knocking me around, trying to beat the Talent out of me. When your best friend takes something like that on for you, yeah, it shifts the balance. Makes you grateful. Anything you say, bud. Anything for a friend, right? I guess when a kid takes on something like that, and comes out the winner…I guess that changes him too. That’s when Marco really started to believe that the rules just didn’t apply to him.

  I stood next to him and moved us toward the Employees Only door at the back of the store. Standing behind me, no one could see him. He wasn’t as tall as I am and even though he kind of had a wrestler’s build, as long as he stood sideways, he was covered. Unlike Rob who was going to have to crouch down somehow—if I didn’t get us out of this.

  The door swung open, a guy came out wheeling a pallet of cardboard boxes, and Marco and I leapt through the door before it swung shut again. If there had been someone in there, Marco would have to think fast, but I think he liked the possibility of getting to lie when there was no chance of getting into any real trouble.